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“Meh,” said Damon. “We needed a break.”
She asked Frankie if they could speak alone. In private.
He put his hands together in front of his face, his fingers of each hand aligned perfectly as if praying, and then exhaled with unbelievable histrionics. “If it’s to talk about what you texted me…no. I think you should hear what everyone has to say.”
Was he throwing her under the bus? Or was he just being a coward? She couldn’t decide and then she decided that it didn’t matter. She was cornered.
“Okay,” she began. She and Frankie were standing in front of the pair, and he tried to guide her toward the couch. She resisted. She didn’t want to sit down. She was electric with misgivings and distrust. “Today you had me out at Red Rocks doing that photo shoot. When I agreed, I thought it was just to look outdoorsy and wholesome. I expected hiking shorts and—”
“You were in hiking shorts,” said Damon Ioannidis.
“And then that photographer insisted I wear that stupid British flag scarf and those ridiculous Wellingtons!”
“Wellingtons?” asked Damon.
“Boots! British boots! You made me look like Diana, which meant I looked like my sister!”
Frankie tried to mollify her: “You looked like a hiker at Red Rocks, baby, that’s all.”
“No! Look, I did it. I knew I was stepping on Crissy’s toes. But I figured it was a harmless wrong, not…”
“Not what?” asked Rory.
“Not a someone-was-going-to-get-killed wrong.”
Frankie folded his arms across his chest. “You said something about that in your text. I wish you hadn’t.”
“We all wish you hadn’t,” added Rory.
“Things like that can be misconstrued,” said Damon. “And guys like Tony Lombardo? They’re probably reading your texts.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Frankie told them, and then he smiled at her as if he were protecting her. Like she had been chastised, but it was okay now and he had her back. For a long second, she wasn’t sure when she had seen that look on his face before, but then she remembered: her office back in Burlington, when he was trying to convince his son that the three grown-ups surrounding the teen—Frankie, his wife, and Betsy Dowling, the social worker—weren’t all in league against him and whatever he’d done wasn’t cataclysmic.
“Okay?” he said to his partners. They said nothing, and Damon reached for the Scotch. “Who was it who died?” Frankie asked her.
Damon raised his eyebrows inquisitively as he finished a long sip, the implication being that he was genuinely curious.
“You all know,” she said. The anger inside her was pounding water against a dam. “You all know.”
“Who died?” Frankie pressed.
“Stop it! Stop this playacting now!” she demanded.
“Okay, fine. No more playacting. He had to go,” said Rory, and Frankie and Damon’s heads both swiveled like bobblehead dolls, and they looked at him like he’d lost his mind. He shrugged at their reaction. “She’s a big girl,” he added.
“Rory,” Frankie began, but it was clear he didn’t know what to say.
“Our people in California and West Palm Beach wanted him gone. That’s all there is to it. And Frankie? Your girlfriend just admitted that she knew what she was doing was wrong. She made a choice.”
“People are going to think my sister was there at Red Rocks,” she hissed. “Yeah, I thought I looked a little like Diana, but I didn’t know you were framing my sister for murder.”
Rory tapped his temple with his index finger. “We all saw the resemblance between you two. It was a natural.”
“Crissy’s car,” she said, her mind trying to latch on to anything that would suggest her sister’s innocence.
“Her car was there, too—out at Red Rocks. Your sister is on the BP parking garage camera retrieving her wheels, and then her wheels are on the Red Rocks parking lot cam. We crossed that t and dotted that i.”
Abruptly, her knees were buckling, and she was feeling dizzy and the world was growing dark. Who in the world had retrieved the car from the garage? It wasn’t her. Some Vegas model in a wig? She felt Frankie guiding her to a plush corner of the couch and sitting her down, then lowering himself onto the leather beside her.
